Jennifer Roback Morse

Jennifer Roback Morse served as a Research Fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1997-2005. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester in 1980. She taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University for 15 years. She writes about the family and the free society. Her first book, Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work, shows why the family is the necessary building block for a free society and why so many modern attempted substitutes for the family do not work. Her second book, Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World, exposes the sexual revolution’s fraudulent promise of freedom and points the way to the most thrilling adventure of all—life-long love.

Jennifer is currently a Research Fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. She lives in Vista, CA, where she pursues her primary vocation as wife and mother, combined with an avocation of writing and lecturing.

She and her husband are the parents of an adopted child, a birth child, and two foster children.

In honor of National Foster Care Month, I would like to say a word on behalf of older kids. We have been foster parents for San Diego County since 2003. We have had 8 children in that time, all between the ages of 6 and 12. In our experience, fostering school age kids has many advantages.

I have been debating the impact of contraception on society over at www.marriagedebate.com for the last week. My opponent asked me whether I didn’t really want to ban contraception, saying, "Don't tell me what you think is possible. Surely you have a dream." This is my response.

A book with a presumptuous title like, How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex, had better deliver. Cristina Page’s book of this title tries to motivate people by scaring them. Pro-life advocates will not recognize themselves in the cartoon caricature Ms. Page presents of them.

Alpine, California, is a peaceful rural community that lies at the foothills of the Viejas Mountains, east of San Diego. Bordering the Cleveland National Forest, this friendly village hardly seems a likely setting for a show-down over free enterprise, disabled rights and lawsuit abuse.

It was the audio that did it. Riding in the car, listening to a news report of the "student protests" against the immigration bills, I heard the sounds of crowds chanting, shouting, demanding. For a moment, I thought I was hearing student protesters in France. And that sound alarmed me, and activated me on immigration in a way no economic arguments could do.

Our culture glamorizes early sexual activity, unmarried sexual activity, and unmarried childbearing. But these cultural influences have very different implications for poorly educated, low-income women of color, than for the elite opinion-makers who graduate from exclusive universities.

Catholic Charities in Boston just shut down its adoptions program rather than capitulate on the issue of gay adoption. But the question is poorly posed. Instead of asking whether gays should be foster parents, we should ask, what would be most helpful for foster children?

“Spineless European politician” is such a common image that an author can safely omit the first word if under a word-count crunch. So it is definitely newsworthy when the Prime Minister of Denmark shows some serious spine, by standing up to the world of howling Muslim street thugs. His country deserves our support.

Politicians have short attention spans. A long-term plan is the length of an election cycle. We are so dominated by politics that we forget that other institutions have longer planning horizons. The Catholic Church, for instance, famously thinks in terms of centuries. I got a demonstration of this last weekend in Rome, of all places.